29 September 2014 1:11 PM

In many ways the most damaging and destructive strain in British politics is the one that thinks UKIP is just a crisis for the Tory Party. The idea is that some sort of deal between the two organisations will solve the Tory difficulty – and that this is somehow the beneficial and desirable result for which all should hope.

But why? This quarrel is not about the Tory Party, it is about the country, its independence, laws and liberty. Why would anyone sacrifice the country to save the Tory Party? It would be like sacrificing the ship to save the figurehead.

UKIP is not the reason for the Tory Party’s unending, unstoppable decline. Indeed, the only reason that decline has not been far greater is that the Tory party has long been on life support. This has come from billionaire donors , the state and (since the Tory party became explicitly Blairite under David Cameron) the BBC.

The crisis of the Tory Party long predated UKIP’s rise. No serious opinion poll has predicted a Tory Party general election win for two decades. The Tory Party struggles to get much above 24% of the national vote (though this tends to inflated into 36% in headline figures, by leaving out all the ‘don’t knows’, ‘won’t says’ and ‘won’t votes’ who together now form the biggest single political grouping in the country).

In regional terms, the Tories remain pitufully weak in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. In organisational terms, it barely exists in most of the country. The party’s real membership figures are a secret, with good reason. British Leyland in the days of the Austin Allegro was a more viable prospect than the Tory Party is now.

The Tory Party, as I correctly stated for years before 2010, never had a chance of winning that year’s election. It has even less hope of winning in 2015. This is not because of UKIP.

UKIP has come into being as a result of the Tory decline. It is not the cause of it.

The Tory decline is the result of two things: much of the Tory vote has either passed away, or finally, after enduring years of insults and contempt, realized that the Tory high command hates its members and voters, and simply uses them to obtain office for its own cynical and unconservative purposes.

In fact, such a UKIP-Tory deal would be deeply dishonest, and its only aim would be the destruction of UKIP and the crushing of the conservative revolt against the liberal Tory monolith. It is only being talked about now because the Tory party’s original more honest strategy, of abuse and smears against a declared enemy, hasn’t worked.

You might call it ‘The Hannan Delusion’, since the Euro-MP Daniel Hannan likes to voice the idea.

I have never been an admirer of Mr Hannan, and my regard for this Euro-MP has grown less over the years. The more he parades himself as an intellectual, the less he seems to be thinking.

Mr Hannan laments :‘But the real sadness is that there should be two such parties in Britain, their rivalry retarding their shared objectives.’

Whatever *is* he talking about? The two parties do *not* share objectives. They are rivals because they differ utterly on the right future for the country. A coalition between them would be an abomination, like those science fiction creatures in the horror movies, with the head of a bluebottle and the body of a man.

UKIP exists precisely because the Tory Party has become, in recent years, a socially liberal, globalist, pro-immigration egalitarian party, committed to permanent British membership of the EU.

This is not because the Tory leadership believe in any of these things. It is because they believe in nothing, and so readily absorb the spirit of the age. It rushes into the vacuum in their heads and hearts.

The Tory decision to deal with Blairism by embracing it left no sentient being in any doubt that the Tory Party is simply an alternative New Labour formation.

The substantial number of people who do not share these Blairite objectives have either abstained from voting for the Tories, or, in increasing numbers, have switched their vote to UKIP. They have not, in many cases, done this as a ‘protest’. They have enough experience of the Tories to know that this is futile.

The Tory party does not change in response to protest. It pretends to change.

The best they can hope for are some more attempts to smear the same old lipstick on the same old pig – vague, distant , worthless pledges to do something or other at some point years hence, while doing the precise opposite now.

Many former Tories have grasped (as so many journalists have been incredibly slow to do) that Mr Cameron’s protestations of ‘Euroscepticism’ (whatever that is) are utterly insincere and cosmetic. They have grasped that a jam-tomorrow referendum is not a commitment, but a manoeuvre.

In fact, it may be worse than that. The referendum almost certainly will never take place. But if it does, in the hands of the Tories, it is a danger, not an opportunity.

A referendum on EU membership, in which all the forces of the establishment will fight and lie for a vote to stay in, could close the debate on the subject for 30 years, much as the 1975 vote did.

Before Harold Wilson seized on the idea of a plebiscite, to save his own bacon, most serious experts viewed such votes as violations of the British constitution, in which Parliament is sovereign. I still do.

In any case, what use would a vote to leave the EU be, if the Parliamentary elite still wanted to stay, and there was no Commons majority in favour of leaving?

Westminster’s power to delay and frustrate is enormous, especially if the executive and the civil service are involved. The act of leaving the EU is legally simple. But it would be politically and diplomatically complicated, and we could easily end up officially ‘out’ but actually ‘in’ for all practical purposes.

The only way to leave is for a party committed to leaving to secure a parliamentary majority for that policy, having openly campaigned for it. The Tory Party cannot possibly be that party.

Since it lost the Empire and bankrupted the country in 1939, and then made things even worse at Suez in 1956, the Tory Party has been almost obsessively searching for ways of exaggerating Britain’s power and influence – when a far better policy would have been to accept that we were not what we had been, and work instead on being a successful and prosperous medium-sized independent nation.

Mr Hannan persists: ‘The values of Ukip and the Tories are not so very different: patriotism, freedom, family, enterprise, dislike of the European Court of Human Rights, support for our Armed Services, resentment of the power-crazed EU.’

Let me take these one by one. Firstly, see the bait and switch here? ‘Values’ are not ‘Policies’. ‘Values’ are vague feelings embraced in public by politicians trying to suck up to voters. Specific policies, which you intend to implement in office, are quite different. ‘Values’ are as unlike ‘Policies’ as lottery prize promises are unlike written contracts.

Patriotism as bombast is worthless. Patriotism as policy involves such things as the protection of our distinct legal system, the very thing the Tory party is now actively trying to hand over to the EU, when it doesn’t actually need to.

Freedom depends very heavily upon that legal system. I do not think the present-day Tory Party has much to say about ‘freedom’. How long (now we are at permanent war with ISIS) before we face a new bout of ‘anti-terror’ laws, the usual excuse to undermine habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, to menace freedom of speech and freedom of movement?

The Tory party has been complicit in the 50-year assault on the family - easy divorce, huge powers for social workers, destruction of the authority of parents, pressure on women to go out to work. Enterprise? I’ll leave it to others to say what they think of the Tory Party’s attitude towards this. All I know is that I’d be terrified of starting a small business in the midst of the current maze of regulation, legal liability and taxation.

As for the ECHR, the question is not whether you ‘dislike’ it but whether you accept or reject the doctrine of ‘Human Rights’ which underpins it, and whether you are prepared to liberate the laws of these islands from this wholly alien and harmful influence.

Westminster politicians love being able to use the ECHR as cover – claiming it has ‘forced’ them to do things they secretly want to do. It has no such power, unless they give that power to it. The Tories have had years to come up with proposals to lift the Human Rights burden. They never emerge, but noisy speeches are made when elections are in the offing. Does Mr Hannan, who is undoubtedly intelligent in a general way, really not grasp what this is about?

As for ‘support for our armed services’, this is actually quite a funny way of describing the most devastating cuts in Britain’s armed forces in the modern era. And ‘resentment of the power-crazed EU’ is just blowhard posturing, like the ludicrous campaign against Jean-Claude Juncker a few months ago. It may even be that the Tories do ‘resent’ the EU (though in practice they seem to get along quite well with its laws and institutions) . But they don’t resent it enough to want to do the only thing that would reduce its influence – leave it.

In any case Mr Hannan is bright enough to know that ‘resentment’ is not equivalent to a policy of withdrawal. That’s why he uses the word ‘resentment’. He knows that if he said ‘opposition’, people would spot his bait-and-switch.

What he seeks to do is to give the impression that Tory posturing and bluster, designed to make it look as if the Tories hold certain positions when they don't really, is equivalent to real UKIP policies, which actually express and aim to fulfil those positions in practice.

As for the fact that a lot of Tory supporters favour a trade-only relationship with the EU, that’s just a measure of how deluded Tory supporters are. The Tory high command, who are totally immune from the wishes of their members and supporters, are wholly committed to continuing EU membership and integration. There is no mechanism in the Conservative Party constitution, by which members or supporters can influence the policy of the party leadership. None. This is why the Tory leadership loathes the Tory membership. The puzzle is why the members don’t give the loathing back with interest. But party loyalty is the secret weapon of the anti-British elite.

Then look at Mr Hannan’s next piece of sleight of hand. He warns that if Ed Miliband come to office he will ‘cancel’ the ‘referendum on EU membership for which Conservative MPs have voted’.

No he won’t.

There is nothing to cancel. The referendum would only take place if the Tories won the next election, which they were never going to do. How on earth are they supposed to win in 2015 if they couldn’t win in 2010? What opinion polls have ever shown them in a position to win? Does Mr Cameron either want or intend to fulfil this airy, distant promise? What do you think? What does Mr Hannan think, honestly? If he’s as bright as everyone claims, how come he is fooled by this transparent dodge?

The most recent poll I’ve seen, done by COMRES for the Independent on Sunday and published yesterday(28th September) shows Labour at 35%, the Tories at 29% and UKIP at 19% (Lib Dems are 7% and ‘others’ at 10%) - and the fieldwork for that must have been done *before* the events of the weekend.

If you look at many poll reports in the pro-establishment papers, they give figures for the popularity of the leaders, but bury or omit the actual voting intention numbers, which are the only ones that matter, and which tend to show Labour in the lead despiet the incessant belittling of Ed Miliband. This is because the media classes are once more trying to help their friends, the Blairite Tories, by pretending that they are the winning party, in the hope that the appearance of success will bring in more votes.

The fact is, even if you can tell the political difference between Mr Miliband and Mr Cameron, and care which of them is Prime Minister (which I can’t and I don’t), you are quite free to vote UKIP, or abstain. It will make no difference.

Labour will be the largest single party after May next year and might just score a small majority. Anyway, who cares much? Name one significant practical difference between New Labour and the Blairite Tories except (as I never tire of pointing out) that New Labour would never have dared smash up the armed forces as badly as David Cameron has done. Mr Hannan claims that under a Labour government ‘We’ll have more EU integration’ – Oh, you mean, like handing back home affairs powers to Brussels which we could have kept? . Oh, sorry, the Tories are doing that.

And then he prates of ‘a reversal of the education and welfare reforms’ – The education reforms are backed by many Blairites, flatly refuse to address the key question of selection by ability, and entrench the system of selection by money and cunning which has cursed British state education for 40 years. And who will miss the ‘welfare reforms’ - cumbersome , apparently unworkable and in some cases unfair and stupid, totally ignoring the real need to rebuild the married family?

As for ‘higher taxes, higher borrowing, higher immigration, higher unemployment’, isn’t that precisely what the Tories have been doing? The 40% tax rate now reaches into the lives of modest earners. Unemployment is concealed by legions of ‘self-employed ‘ people who aren’t actually working much, borrowing rises every minute of the day thanks to George Osborne’s continuing profligacy.

And immigration – thanks to Mr Cameron’s Libyan adventure, combined with our total loss of control over our EU borders – is about to surge to unprecedented levels.

But it is possible that we might still be able to deliver a death-blow to the Tory party itself, the greatest existing obstacle to the development of a genuinely pro-British political formation, because it is incapable either of standing up for the country, or of winning a majority. And so we would do the country some long-term good.

Finally there’s this outstandingly mistaken passage: ‘From a Conservative point of view, a Ukip MP is surely preferable to a Labour one.’

I should have thought the Tory high command would much prefer to see a Labour MP to a UKIP one. UKIP, for all its faults, is a genuine subversive threat to the pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage three-party consensus which has spent the past half-century messing up the country. Labour is part of that consensus, as are the Tories, and as Mr Hannan is for as long as he remains part of the Tory machine.

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14 January 2010 8:52 AM

More in response to 'Mev'. I think Hannan and Carswell's 'manifesto' pretty empty unless we leave the EU. Yet they won't break with the pro-EU Tory Party, so it is really all just airy stuff. Also I'm by no means sure that all this alleged decentralisation is the point, or the right route. The real issue is the family, private life and the rule of law, within an independent nation.

Any manifesto must have two aims – one, to enthuse enough voters to vote for you; two, to provide an initial programme of achievable goals for one parliament. Welfare reform cannot really be at the start of any proper conservative programme, since the real reform to welfare must be achieved over time by recreating the family structures and independent charitable institutions which an over-extended welfare state has supplanted or eviscerated. You also need to educate children so that they can grow up to be free people, good parents and valuable workers. To begin with welfare reform is like beginning to build a house by constructing the roof. In most cases, it's not the fault of the individuals involved that they are dependent on the state. But if you first make them dependent on your help, then propose to cut off their help, don't be surprised if they don't support you.

Some other points

‘Mev' says: ’I still repeat my main questions which these two points to previous articles do not answer:1. Even IF the Tories did not win AND a new party did emerge – would this not just split the right-wing vote into two parties gaining about 15-20 per cent each and therefore allowing Labour in forever and a day on 30 per cent of the vote?’

A. Once again I wearily roll the same old stone up the same old hill. Please listen, this time. The Tories are not 'right-wing', but thanks to inertia and tribal loyalty they continue to receive an important portion of a much larger potential conservative vote, and to deprive any rival of that tribal vote. They have lost many of their own original supporters, have ceased to exist in Wales and Scotland, and also are repellent to a large number of conservative minded people who are former Labour voters. Their disappearance would remove this obstacle and permit socially and morally conservative voters to unite in a singe voting bloc. The Tories, as a party, are an obstacle to the formation of a voting bloc in the electorate, because they are so loathed, as a part, that people won't vote for policies they like, if the Tories espouse them.

My belief is that the Tories, if defeated again, will cease to exist as a party. They are only kept in being at the moment by government subsidy (Short Money), the BBC's support and by a few millionaires. Once they are clearly shown to be incapable of winning an election, these props will go. If they fail to win an election against this awful government, then it is my belief and hope that they will collapse. Many of their MPs and supporters will leave politics altogether, others will go to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, where they belong. Some will be interested in an entirely new party, which will not be the Conservatives and so will be able to appeal to the many patriotic, law-abiding people abandoned by Labour. Hence the concentration in the 'manifesto of sorts' on the issues of crime, disorder and mass immigration, and education, which affect such people most directly.

‘2. Aren't the biggest supporters of his 'Don't Vote Tory' strategy the Labour Party – due to point one above (he would be better off creating a proper socialist party to split the left-wing vote if he really wants to see right-wing policies in this country. Curiously we have actually seen the creating of multiple right-wing parties – with UKIP/Tory/English Democrats/BNP (although they're now marching into Labour territory, which is why Labour are trying to get them 'banned') all vying for similar(ish) voters – a conspiracy theorist might suspect these parties had been created by socialist for this very purpose. Another one would certainly not help.’

A. No. Why do people keep on trotting out this rubbish? The metropolitan left are perfectly happy with the prospect of a Cameron government (hence the support of the Guardian and the BBC for the Cameroons). The Labour Party leadership is increasingly anxious to lose the next election, as far as I can see. I am sure most of its leading members a) long to enrich themselves in quangos, directorships, speechmaking bureaux, international bodies etc and b) dread being made to stick around and clear up the mess they know they have left behind. Others, ambitious for high office, know that they cannot really begin their campaigns for the leadership until they are in opposition. Further, New Labour are justifiably confident that the Tories, who support all their major policies, will not undo any of their important acts. So when Labour come back (as they will if the Tories win, because nothing revives Labour like a Tory government) they will be able to carry on where they left off.

‘3. Has he any evidence to show that there are any 'notable people' ready to create this New Party? (Telling the rest of 'us' that it's up to us normal working people to create this party is just not going to cut it I'm afraid - you need central and well known people to get the ball rolling, and around whom the rest would gather).’

A. No, I have no evidence at all, and have never claimed to have it. But it makes sense, even so. My case has always been (for the nine millionth time) that there is no chance at all of such a party being created if the Tories win. There is a chance, perhaps a slim one, of it being created if the Tories lose. The precedent is the 'Gang of Four' who created the SDP and would have destroyed Labour if the Tories hadn't stepped in to save it. They didn't emerge until Labour were deep in the mire. Since serious conservatives inside and outside the Tory Party know that they have absolutely nothing to gain from a Cameron government (and probably quite a bit to lose, given the anti-conservative purge he will launch if he wins) , it is therefore an easy calculation to make. The defeat of Mr Cameron is a necessary condition for a new party. It is not a sufficient condition. Only if all those people who rage on about how much they hate the direction this country is taking are prepared to act will such a party be formed. But until the Tory-voting masses realise that they have no friend at Westminster unless they build a new party (which is true at the moment, but they can't see it), they won't build it. And only a fourth successive Tory defeat in a row can persuade them of that. Hence the unique chance available now, but not at the next election.

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15 August 2009 7:17 PM

The worst thing a modern politician can do is to say what he really thinks. Tory MP Alan Duncan really thinks he couldn’t live on £64,000 a year, which he couldn’t, at least in the style to which he has become accustomed. Tory MEP Daniel Hannan thinks the NHS is a lumbering and inefficient State bureaucracy, which it is.

Both of these views are pretty common in the Tory Party, but they can’t be said out loud because the Tories are trying so very hard to be elected on a false prospectus.

The sad thing is that Daniel Hannan is in much more trouble with David Cameron than Alan Duncan.

Why? Because Mr Cameron has genuinely decided that the Tories must now bow the knee to the sacred NHS, however bad they know it is, in their frantic struggle to claw votes from the Liberal Democrats, and persuade Labour supporters to stay at home on polling day.

Labour may claim that there is a secret Tory agenda to privatise it, but actually there’s no such thing. I happen to think that we make too much of a fetish about health care, here and in America, because we’re all anxious to keep death at a distance and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I’ve used both the NHS and the American system. Both have advantages, both have drawbacks. I’ve often defended the NHS against ignorant bashing in the US, and defended the US system against ignorant bashing here. The truth is that doctors can patch us up if we injure ourselves, cure a rather limited number of diseases with pills or surgery, and comfort us if we feel rotten – but most of our ills are caused by the way we live, and many are the inevitable results of age.

Politics has no answer to this. That’s why Mr Duncan’s blurted honesty is much more politically significant than Mr Hannan’s.

So is the fact that he wasn’t instantly sacked. Mr Duncan, a keen supporter of the sexual and cultural revolution, is one of the Cameron inner circle. Like Mr Cameron himself – who makes greedy claims for a huge country house he could have paid for himself – he’s been let off.

Mr Hannan, by contrast, is quite principled and really ought to know better than to belong to the Tories at all.

He should realise that his future with them is now very dim, and quit. I really do hope voters get the correct message from all this.

The rich rewards still given to politicians are their pay-off for betraying the public. Those in all parties who are useful to the liberal elite, especially Tories, will continue to benefit. Don’t like it? Don’t vote for them. I never do.

The modern Menace...all he needs now is a collection of ASBOs

The BBC is to soften Dennis the Menace for a TV series. He will no longer be able to be so nasty to Walter the Softie, in case this is viewed as ‘homophobic’.

Actually, Dennis has already been influenced by political correctness. The Menace was regularly slippered for his wrongdoing back in the late Fifties. I am told this stopped around the time John Major became Prime Minister.

How far can the makeover go? If the BBC is allowed to take over his character, it won’t be long before he turns into a thoroughly modern Menace, denouncing his parents and teachers for ‘abuse’, and watching as they are carted off by PC Police. Dennis will, no doubt, be put in a children’s home by social services before amassing a large collection of ASBOs.

Loophole that could tie the BBC in knots

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky now dissents against the slowly growing menace of liberal totalitarianism here – and loathes the BBC so much he refuses to watch his TV or pay his licence fee.

Perhaps realising they are up against someone really determined, and that prosecuting him could be troublesome, the Licensing Authority have written him an amazing letter. I have put the whole text on my blog.

It says: ‘A TV licence is only required where a television set is installed or used for the purpose of receiving television programmes. You have stated in your recent letter that you have not watched television since 2001, accordingly your television set is “not installed or used for receiving television programme services” at this time.

Consequently, on the basis of the information that we have, our view is that you are not at this time committing an offence contrary to Section 363 of the Act.’

Have they thought this through? If the rest of us say we aren’t watching television either, how can they prove we are?

Waiting in vain for the Botox backlash

Arlene Phillips is dumped from a TV show for a younger model. Anna Ford makes her regular complaint that grey-haired women aren’t allowed on TV, while a silvering Jeremy Paxman is. In less exalted parts of the country, women are traded in by husbands and boyfriends for showing signs of age, and also by employers.

Horribly, the grotesque, distressing practice of plastic surgery – once the last resort of Hollywood beauties trying to stay in business – is becoming commonplace. Women living in suburbs get Botox or worse.

Yet nobody in the great feminist movement seems interested. Surely they should be outraged at this mass self-mutilation by the female sex. They’re not. I think this is because they, like me, have worked out that it is the direct result of their own demands – the abolition of lifelong marriage, combined with the conscription of women into lifelong wage-slavery.

Both these changes force women to try to appear young as long as possible, so as to avoid ending up alone and destitute.

This is what is officially called ‘progress’. And please note that squeaky George Osborne, the ‘Shadow Chancellor’, wants the Tory Party to be viewed as ‘progressive’. He’s quite right. It is. And those who are, like me, sick of progress should take note.

***********************Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary who flirted with Marxism in his 30s but won’t discuss it now, is rude about people who think we are wasting British lives in Afghanistan. Brigadier Ainsworth presumably often led bayonet charges and cleared minefields in his days on Coventry City Council’s finance committee. Now he loftily calls opponents of his pointless, incompetently managed war ‘defeatists’.

As a member of a Government which surrendered to the terrorist murderers of the IRA, the biggest defeat in a generation, he’s got a nerve. We will pull out of Afghanistan, beaten, eventually. The courageous Minister will be the one who admits it and braves the wrath of Washington. Meanwhile the coffins keep coming home, and where are the politicians then?